Apple Education Announcement Is “GarageBand For E-Books”

Apple’s “education announcement” in NYC this Thursday may turn out to be software-related. According to Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman, Apple will be launching a “GarageBand for e-books.”

These would be tools that allow publishers to easily create textbooks for the iPad. Many schools have deployed iPads (the Cedars School in Scotland has given one to every pupil), so putting the textbooks on there makes sense, especially to the poor kids who have to drag dead trees from class to class because their lockers have been ditched for reasons of security theater.

The trouble, until now at least, is that many texts aren’t available on the iPad, or they are dog-ugly. Kno already makes a great interactive textbook app for the iPad, but the selection is still small compared to paper.

A “GarageBand for e-books” could make it cheap and easy to produce texts, and presumably allow teachers and pupils to make their own custom books. And if it comes along with it’s own reading app on the iPad’s home screen, it could do for textbooks what Newsstand did for iPad periodicals.

There should be some books ready at launch, too. According to the Wall Street Journal, publisher McGraw-Hill “has been working with Apple on its announcement since June.”

We’ll find out for sure a couple of days from now. If it’s better than the terrible iBooks, this could be just the thing that gets schools buying iPads.